As it turns out, developer Embark Studios is using AI for essentially all the voicework in The Finals.
I opened the article planning to dislike it, and I do dislike the man’s voice (the woman’s voice sounds quite good though), but then I thought about it. Sports announcers actually seem like a decent use for AI. I would imagine that it would be incredibly difficult to build decent announcers from pre-recorded voice lines… It’s heavily context-dependent, and this way it can even read out the team names, which I imagine are chosen by the teams. I think this could possibly work well. I don’t see how to create a system like this without AI
It’s not a generative model running on your graphics card coming up with novel speech to match the gamestate; it would never be fast enough (and you’re also using that card to, you know, run the graphics). They’re using machine learning to generate speech for their pre-written lines so that they can avoid hiring voice actors. I guess they didn’t want to try the old way of having whoever isn’t too busy in your office record the lines.
Depending on how many variables/contexts there are in the lines, that could still be a combinatorial nightmare to record.
Played a couple of matches already and I haven’t noticed. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. The announcers need to relay information about events in the game, but you’re focused on other stuff happening and don’t really have time to think about their voices.
The biggest issue to me seems to be the model struggling to put emphasis in the right places, but if that’s something you can manually tune…
Aside from that, it sounds fine. I would hate to be a VA right now. Maybe it won’t kill the field, but it will reduce a lot of job opportunities.
